And that’s one of the clues that hit us in the face in 2008 that we completely ignored. Sure, it’s just some dumb-old broad who just reads the tabloids saying she can’t trust Obama 'cause he’s an Arab. When in reality, there’s millions of Americans like her.
And Sen. McCain was the only one I heard about defending Obama at the time, so the GOP is hardly different today than it was in 2008.
It’s ambiguous. If you want to read “He’s decent. He’s not an Arab.” you can do that, and if you want to read “He’s decent, because he’s not an Arab.” you can read that as well. It was a nicely-phrased little save, a dog whistle without the usual dog-whistle phrases.
And we knew this at the time. It’s something GOP candidates have had to do for a long time, ever since they scooped up the pro-Segregationists decades ago. I myself made a post on it, saying it was nice he didn’t dive right into racism but noting that it was a bit dog-whistly and wishing that he had said outright that Arabs could be good people. Saying it’s unalloyed good now is just an example of not speaking ill of the dead, which is simple dishonesty.
Meet Bettina Rodriguez Aguilera, running for Congress in the Miami area. By all accounts, she’s a sane adult with commitment to community service etc., and actually has the Miami Herald’s endorsement. But there’s one small detail:
That’s not really the craziest or stupidest thing that republicans have professed belief in.
I do wonder if that is an intentional part of the platform at this point. Just pushing and pushing against the idea that there is an objective reality. It doesn’t matter if you believe in UFO’s, you believe in a fairy in the sky, or you believe that climate change is a hoax perpetuated by China, or you believe that John Kerry gets to pull the trigger on a hurricane splitting weather machine; you believe in things that simply are not true, and can be shown to not be true with a moment of critical thinking.
It wears down the critical thinking of not only the believers, but their interlocutors as well. After a while, in order to try to get through to these people important things like climate change, responsible fiscal policies, functional health care systems, or socioeconomic issues and their relations to law enforcement, you start letting things like bigfoot, or UFO’s, or even the moon landing go, trying to focus on what is important. The problem is, is that what is important isn’t just these issues themselves, but people having the ability to actually understand these issues, and there seems to be a growing number of people who not only do not understand the issues, not only mock the understanding of the issues, but also distract the people who are trying to work on solutions to these issues into explaining, once again, for the nth time, basic logic.
I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic. But the GOP have been disparaging non-partisan press for a while now. I don’t blame a newspaper for endorsing a UFO kook over candidates who apparently hate and/or fear the independent press. The kook is probably far less dangerous.
This time, not at all. Refusing to take all possible advantage of free publicity, and all avenues to get your message out, is a Stupid Republican Idea. It makes you look like you’re afraid to let voters know what you really think and what you’d really do.
I guess parody of this stuff has become absolutely impossible because I can’t imagine writing a parody that is any more ridiculous than what was actually said there.
They are just doing this absurd stuff to bolster the idiot’s claim that his abusive tirades about Sandy Hook were crazy talk that no one would take seriously. The parents of the dead children “child actors” are worked up over harmless conjecture rather than calculated abuse.
“…can’t imagine…” How about a story where Senator, Secretary of State, and Presidential hopeful Hilary Clinton is running a child sex slave ring out of a pizzeria in D.C.? No one could possibly imagine this to be true and take a semi-automatic rifle and shoot up said pizzeria.:smack:
McCain was one of only three GOP Senators to stand up and say ‘NO’ twice when Trump’s original cabinet was up for vote. (Interestingly no two of these three voted against the same nominee. McCain said no to Mulvaney (OMB) and Lighthizer (Trade Rep); Rand Paul voted against Pompeo and Coats (both confirmed easily); Susan Collins voted aganst DeVos and Pruitt. DeVos was the one 50-50 Cabinet official where Pence was forced to mount the dais and make his Constitutional Fart.)
McCain’s strengths were integrity and trying to put the country ahead of politics … but not intellect nor intelligent stances on the issues.
He was confronted with a woman who said " {Lie 1} because {Lie 2} because {I am racist}." It was not the time or place for McCain to deliver a long lecture on a plurality of lies or about how despicable and ignorant the woman was. McCain did the best he could. A more eloquent man might have killed two lies with one pithy sentence … or just sowed further confusion.
She’s a Trumpling, by which I mean she supports Donald Trump’s stated agenda and she’s a delusional narcissist with her feet so far in her mouth she can kick her own ass from the inside:
Musing… the immediacy and ubiquity of social media has made it possible for us to see how stupid people really are. In the past, she would have said these things to a couple of friends and unless a reporter picked it up, that would have been that. Actually, even if a reporter had picked it up, the comment might have been repeated in a few outlets and died a natural and deserved death. Now that people can urp out every lame, destructive, cruel, ignorant thought as soon as they think it, with no possibility of retraction, we’re finding out that lots of people we assumed were reasonably intelligent are, in fact, dumb as a box of hair.